A Hundred Year Story, Part 33

By Elton Camp

About family automobiles

The six cars we had when I lived with my parents are: a Chevrolet coupe of
unknown year, a 1934 Chevrolet coupe, 1949 Ford, 1955 Buick, 1938 Chevrolet coupe
(as a second car), and1962 Ford Falcon. After I left home they purchased a long string of
cars, sometimes with only months in between. The reason for this is detailed elsewhere.

My parents had bought an old Chevrolet coupe but that was before I was born so I
don’t know anything of the circumstances. For a long time I didn’t realize it was
different from the 1934 coupe that I do remember. The fact that it had “knee action”
might help date it since that type suspension first appeared in 1931.

That’s the car that my father parked on the road that in those days, ran behind
Uncle Gaston & Aunt Edee’s house at Fayetteville. He looked up, saw a passing car, and
commented, “Somebody sure is taking off fast down the hill.” A few seconds later he
added in shock, “That’s my car!” It’d rolled away. Such incidents weren’t uncommon
in old model cars. They’d jump out of gear. The parking brakes weren’t reliable. I’ve
seen older people, who recall those days, place a rock behind a tire to prevent a rollaway.
His vehicle wasn’t seriously damaged, however. We have a picture of me as a toddler
along with my father and that black car.

The first family car I definitely recall is the 1934 Chevrolet coupe that had a
strong resemblance to the earlier coupe. Cars were low quality and lasted only a few
years in those days. It’d belonged to a doctor in Boaz who had died. They somehow
managed to acquire it despite scarcity of cars during the World War II period. I never
knew the details.

It had one seat and was designed for carrying only two people. I was small
enough that we got by with it until I was about nine years old. That car had a square cloth
top since manufacturers hadn’t yet learned how to keep down extreme road noise in a
coupe with a solid metal top. The headlights worked only on high beam. The
malfunction made a problem anytime we went out at night.

“Dim those lights,” some yelled as they angrily flashed their own headlights. To
dim them caused them to go out entirely. It was quite dangerous. I suppose they
couldn’t afford to get the problem fixed.

It had other, less serious, problems. The car either had no gas gauge or one that
didn’t work. I recall my father using a stick thrust into the opening to the gas tank to
determine gasoline level. The windshield had an early version of safety glass, but it’d
gone bad. This resulted in an unsightly, permanent translucent frosting around the edges.
When I pressed on the frosting, it temporarily disappeared, but returned as soon as I
released the pressure. A place on the outside back was provided for a spare tire, but it had
none. I don’t know if one was in the trunk since I never recall seeing inside it. The
shabby car was considerably older than what most people drove. My father attempted to
keep it looking presentable. When the paint went bad, he repainted it with a power puff.
That was a common practice of the day.

The next car was an ugly, gunmetal gray 1949 Ford two door sedan, but with a
back seat. I knew vaguely that my parents were discussing purchasing a new car, but had
little interest in such matters at nine years of age. One day I was outside playing at
Mountain View when he drove up in it. Mother apparently had no say in the selection.
When I walked over to look at it, his immediate statement, in a hateful tone filled with
apparent resentment was, “I bought a car with two seats only because of you.”

It was untrue, but I didn’t realize it until years later. One-seated cars were no
longer made in the United States, except for expensive sports models.

I suppose that he was on edge from having gone into debt for a car, but that
statement certainly made me feel bad. “Excuse me for existing,” I thought, but made no
reply. How different it would’ve been had he said, “Look, I bought a car with two seats
so you would have a comfortable place to sit.” He didn’t say things that way. Not ever.

The car’s interior was of the cheapest quality, consistent with its overall
unattractiveness. The seats became threadbare after less than a year. It lacked
accessories except a heater. The paint almost immediately began going bad. Attempts to
polish it were futile. Ford Motor Company has a long record of putting out shoddy and
defective products. This was the main car used to teach me to drive. I’ve described that
elsewhere.

We used that car until I was about 15 years old. Just a few months before trading
it in, he had it painted a shiny black so that it looked much better. We went to the paint
shop to see it while it was in some sort of drying room with bright lights. I was amazed
at how much its looks improved. Still, it was at the end of its useful life. A new car was
a necessity. The cost of the paint job had been wasted.

The next car was a 1955 Buick Special two-door hardtop. The wife of A.J.
Montgomery, a car salesman in Albertville, had driven the car for a few months. Mrs.
Montgomery was a teacher at the same school as my mother so I’d seen that car parked
on the street and admired it for some months. I never dreamed that we’d end up with it.
The car was designed for premium fuel, a financial hardship. To make matters worse, it
got very low gas mileage, about eleven miles per gallon as I recall. Such inefficiency
was typical for cars in the mid 1950s. The car manufacturers didn’t care since no
competition came from foreign makers. The gas companies were delighted with the low
miles per gallon. Fortunately, gas was about 25 cents a gallon, but that amount was
harder to come up with back then than the current price of gas.

My father was particularly suspicious of any automatic transmission. From the

very beginning, he seemed to want it to go bad, foolish as that sounds. The wish was
fulfilled in a strange way. It was necessary in those days to do regular tune-ups on a car
for it to run well, but he failed to do that. When it began to skip because of needing new
spark plugs, he immediately came to the illogical conclusion that the transmission had
gone bad. Occam’s Razor, or merely common sense, should’ve suggested another
explanation.

He took it to T.C. Crain Buick in Guntersville. “The transmission has gone bad in
this thing. It’s good enough for me. I should’ve known better than to buy a car with
automatic transmission. I want you to rebuild it.”

The dealership did as he directed, but the mechanic botched the job. From then
on, the car actually did have transmission problems. It failed to engage normally when
put into drive. We managed to get by without fixing it. It never drove well again.

After a time, the motor suddenly went bad and a local mechanic, Paul Lang,
replaced it with a motor from a wrecked Buick of the same model. It was an unwise
expenditure and the car was never satisfactory. He replaced the motor, but not the
transmission.

When he traded the unreliable vehicle on a new car, the dealer said, “This car has
a bad transmission, but I’ll still give you a large trade-in on it.” The salesman, however,
inflated the price of the new car to disguise the low value of the trade-in. The trick
worked as it does with many people even now.

The Buick was the main car that I drove as a teenager. It was a stylish, attractive
car, so I felt good driving it. Like most teenage boys, I took pride in keeping it clean and
polished. Practically every time I washed or shined it, my parents criticized and mocked
me for my efforts.
In later years, I made little effort to clean or polish their cars mainly because I’d been so
disgusted with criticism as a teenager. On rare occasions when I started to wash their
various cars, they objected, not out of concern for me, but for some unknown reasons of
their own. I suspect that they mainly didn’t want me to use soap and water at their
expense.

I recall the last time I attempted to wash one of their cars at home. I’d already
dragged out the hose, filled the wash bucket, and was about to start when one of them
came outside and demanded that I stop. “I’ll never do it again,” I thought angrily, as I
emptied the soapy water on the ground and returned the hose to its place. “They have no
appreciation at all,” I thought with disgust.
 In fact, I did wash some of their cars in the future, but only at coin washes. I
stopped even doing that at one point after they moved to Russellville. They owned a
1992 gray Lincoln Continental that showed every speck of dirt. Because our own
vehicles were old and unreliable, we began to drive it to the stores for shopping for them
and for us.

“I don’t want you driving the car anymore unless we’re with you,” my father
rudely ordered Delorise.

I told her privately, “If we can’t use it, I’m sure not going to keep it clean
anymore.”

The car got increasingly filthy. I saw them look at it with disapproval, but neither
had the nerve to say anything about it. They knew full well why I had stopped keeping it
clean. At length, it got so bad that I swallowed my resolve and picked up the chore
again.
The year I finished my bachelor’s degree at Jacksonville, my parents were driving
a 1962 Ford Falcon. My father had a life-long assertion that he wanted a car with no
accessories. He got his wish with the Falcon. The car had a manual transmission and
was badly underpowered. Its only redeeming feature was beautiful, pleated red leather
upholstery. None of us liked it, not even him. He realized that he’d made a mistake, and
even admitted it grudgingly. This Falcon’s the car that he accused us of doing away with
about a year before his death. That was one of the few times when he seemed to be off
mentally.

It wasn’t long until they traded the Falcon on the first of a series of three
Plymouths. During the time of the Plymouths, I was away from home and so don’t
remember much about them. The first one was a four-door sedan, pale green, with an
automatic transmission, radio, and heater. This is the car they lent for a couple of days to
Leamon and Alva when they had a major breakdown at the “Y” north of Guntersville. It
wasn’t a particularly nice car. It didn’t have power steering, power brakes, air
conditioning or any of the other things expected in cars today. The steering was
particularly stiff and heavy. It was hard to maneuver, yet far superior to the Falcon.

The next Plymouth was, by far, the nicest car they’d owned to that point. It was a
beautiful yellow four-door sedan with a brown leather, quality interior and, of all things,
power steering and air conditioning. They didn’t keep it long, before they traded it, for no
sound reason, on a 1967 Plymouth, white four-door sedan with air conditioning and other
equipment like the earlier Plymouth. I rather suspected that they traded mostly because I
had a 1966 Plymouth. This made him want a better car than mine. The new car was
much less attractive than the older one, but my father had started the illogical pattern of
frequent trading that accelerated when he later got his hands on the money from the
Morris estate.

Next came a series of Chevrolets, all of them four-door sedans, well equipped like
current cars. The first one was green with an incredibly powerful engine. The next was a
1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic with white body and tan vinyl top. It was a great car that
I liked so well that Delorise and I purchased one nearly like it except for color.

About this time, my father got hold of the Morris money and traded that car for a
blue diesel Chevrolet sedan (the one we drove to Canada when Maria was a small baby),
but like many cars of General Motors, it was a lemon. The transmission wouldn’t shift
into the final gear under 70 miles per hour. That made it very unpleasant to drive.

Disgusted with General Motors, he traded it after only six months on an elegant
Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue. The luxury model was beautiful inside and out and
fully equipped, but in a short time he traded it on a Mercury sedan that he drove for a
short time before trading it on an even more elegant 1988 Lincoln Town Car.

When they first visited Leon and Cleo in that huge sedan, Cleo looked out the
window and said, “Who’s pulled a damn hearse into our driveway!” She actually
mistook the car for a hearse. It was the nicest and most reliable vehicle of any to that
point and was still running well when sold with over 200,000 miles on the odometer.

Somewhere, early in this series of cars, my father, as a second car for his use,
bought a used 1964 Valiant that he drove for years. We moved it to Russellville. He
drove it only occasionally during the first few months, but didn’t want me to drive it even
enough to keep it up. After putting up with it being in the way of getting into the
driveway, I finally backed it into the garage where it stayed for many years without being
cranked

He’d talk about selling it. “I want people to bid on it,” he insisted. “It’s worth a
lot of money.” I thought he was completely mistaken about its value, but that’s one time
when he was correct. After his death, I advertised it in the paper and got numerous phone
calls for weeks. It sold almost immediately, although the buyer had to use a wench to
drag it from the garage. The wheels wouldn’t turn, and so left black “skid” marks inside
the garage as they tugged it out. The car needed a paint job, had engine problems, was
stinky and filthy inside and had defective brakes. Still, the man who bought it acted like
he’d made an extraordinary find. There’s no accounting for people’s tastes. Yet, my
father was correct. I was soon offered more than twice what I asked for the vehicle, but
too late. It was already sold.

After buying the Lincoln Town Car, he’d used up the Morris money, and so didn’t
continue to trade as often. Why mother allowed him to waste her inherited money like
that’s beyond me, especially since he hated my grandparents and treated them with great
disrespect.

It was wrong for him to run through everything they built up their entire lives, but
I had no way to prevent it. Mother could’ve put a stop to it, but wasn’t willing to stand
up to him. I said something to him about it one time, and got the indignant response from
him that it was “None of my business.” Actually it was my business since he had zero
right to the money he was so freely wasting. Inherited money should be used wisely as
long as there are direct descendants who should benefit from it. Car dealers were the
main ones who got benefit from the Morris estate.

If mother had outlived him for years, she’d have greatly needed her family’s
money. If not, it really should’ve gone to me and then to Maria as the actual heirs of the
Morris estate. It made me realize how important it is to put things in writing as to the
disposal of one’s assets, but so far I’ve failed to apply that in my own life. We need to
make a will.

I’m sure the car dealers laughed every time they saw him coming. He was a poor
money manager. No doubt they cheated him each time. But he was spending my
grandparents’ money and didn’t seem to care. It made no sense.

After the Town Car, they bought a gray Lincoln Continental sedan that had
belonged to Dr. C.S. Nix of Hamilton. It drove and rode well, gave excellent mileage, but
had a troublesome air suspension system and a transmission that failed prematurely.

Their last car was the Toyota minivan that we still have as of 2010. He insisted on
a minivan which I thought wasn’t wise.

“You don’t need a van. Get a sedan.”

“No, I’m going to have a van,” he insisted.

Later I saw that he was correct since it was much easier to get them in and out and
to transport wheelchair and walkers. I don’t know how we’d have managed without it.

(STORY TO BE CONTINUED.)